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PETA figured a company that drops tiny animals into beakers of water in a test that has been debunked might also have other ethical problems. And were we ever right! French drugmaker Sanofi has a pockmarked history of deplorable decisions and dirty dealing culminating in more than $1.3 billion in fines imposed by U.S. state and federal agencies over the past two decades.
The forced swim test—in which small animals are compelled to swim for their lives in inescapable containers of water, supposedly as a model to test antidepressant drugs—has been abandoned by more than a dozen companies that heard from PETA, including Johnson & Johnson, Bayer, GSK, AbbVie Inc., Roche, AstraZeneca, Novo Nordisk A/S, Boehringer Ingelheim, Pfizer, and Bristol Myers Squibb.
But Sanofi clings to it. And that’s not the company’s only bad decision over the past 20 years. Just take a look at its history.
Since 2000, Sanofi has faced state and federal allegations of bribery, fleecing Medicaid patients, overcharging military veterans, deceptive marketing, and other serious wrongdoing.
Most recently, in May 2024, the company agreed to pay more than $916 million in a lawsuit brought by the state of Hawaii because it had failed to disclose the efficacy and safety profile of its drug Plavix.
Earlier this year, Sanofi settled a lawsuit worth $100 million with around 4,000 claimants who asserted that the company hadn’t warned users that its heartburn medicine Zantac could cause cancer.
In 2020, Sanofi paid nearly $11.9 million to the feds to resolve allegations that charitable donations were actually kickbacks to Medicare patients used to cover out-of-pocket costs for a multiple sclerosis drug made by the company.
Sanofi paid nearly $15 million to settle its part of a case brought in 2019 by the state of Illinois alleging inflation of wholesale prices used in setting the rates for Medicaid reimbursements.
And in that same year, the company paid $1.6 million in a West Virginia case alleging that it had marketed its drug Plavix as superior to much lower priced aspirin, despite evidence showing that it wasn’t more effective for certain uses.
In 2018, Sanofi paid more than $25 million in a case brought by the federal Securities and Exchange Commission for bribing officials at public hospitals and clinics in Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Syria, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen.
The company’s salespeople generated money for the bribes by submitting false travel and entertainment reimbursement claims. They pooled the money and distributed it as bribes “to increase prescriptions of Sanofi products,” the commission said.
In 2014, the company paid another $39 million fine for a bribery scheme in Germany.
And rounding out Sanofi’s rap sheet, the company also agreed to pay the following to the U.S. Department of Justice:
What You Can Do
Sanofi clearly needs a round of restorative medication for its reputation. We prescribe dropping the forced swim test as the first step in that regimen.
Please TAKE ACTION by boycotting Sanofi’s over-the-counter products until the company ends its use of the forced swim test:
Ban Near-Drowning Tests on Animals
